Leopard: Worth the upgrade?
After installing Leopard onto every Mac in my house and playing around with it extensively, I feel at least someone qualified to offer my opinion on the big question for many Mac users out there: to upgrade, or not to upgrade?
The features in Leopard, as any informed Apple admirer might know, are somewhat lackluster and uninteresting compared to some of the installments made into new operating systems in the past. To be certain, Leopard's strongest feature is Time Machine, and Apple definitely made a wise decision when they placed this feature at the forefront. Not only does Time Machine let you recover files you may have accidentally deleted (which I honestly never do, so this feature is nearly worthless to me), but it also serves as an extremely simple, elegant way to automatically back up your hard drive. How simple? There are two options for Time Machine: On and Off.
By making the backup process simple (and really, quite fun) through a simulated "time travel" experience, Apple has made a task that every computer user should do (but that most computer users never do, including myself) into something every computer user wants to do.
Also notable: iChat! I'm not planning to download Adium (at least not yet), as iChat has proved to equal and exceed Adium's capabilities (except the ability to use my Yahoo! Messenger account, which isn't too lamentable). I have yet to test out the screen sharing feature, but the new backgrounds work like a charm, and are really fun to play around with.
I never used Safari before Leopard, and mostly I still don't, but the ability to make web clippings into Dashboard widgets is a really useful feature. My first clipping? Top ten in all topics on Digg. It's awesome.
The other features in Leopard don't merit too much time to go over. Spaces works as advertised, but I don't ever plan to use it, as it proves to be more of an annoyance to me than anything else. The new Finder is pretty, but hardly any more useful than it was before--except Quicklook, which is super useful. The new dock is one of the most controversial items in Leopard. Personally, I don't mind it so much, but this dock is definitely all about eye candy; really, it only ends up taking up a marginally greater amount of screen space than the last dock. Stacks are nice, but eh, I'll probably never use them. I do like the way it looks to the side, although I feel like theres some wasted space they could have cut out.
But here's the redeeming factor: this upgrade has significantly boosted the performance of my computer. I feel like I've gotten a RAM upgrade--and if your experience is anything like mine, you'll definitely feel the difference. My startup time is faster than before, as well as my overall computing experience. For this reason, I consider the investment totally justifiable.
So here's the verdict: Upgrade. For $129, you get a brand new full-featured operating system with a performance boost, compared to Vista, which requires much higher processing speeds to function properly, and whose entry-level version "Home Basic" (dramatically stripped down for the most dated computers) will set you back $180.
The features in Leopard, as any informed Apple admirer might know, are somewhat lackluster and uninteresting compared to some of the installments made into new operating systems in the past. To be certain, Leopard's strongest feature is Time Machine, and Apple definitely made a wise decision when they placed this feature at the forefront. Not only does Time Machine let you recover files you may have accidentally deleted (which I honestly never do, so this feature is nearly worthless to me), but it also serves as an extremely simple, elegant way to automatically back up your hard drive. How simple? There are two options for Time Machine: On and Off.
By making the backup process simple (and really, quite fun) through a simulated "time travel" experience, Apple has made a task that every computer user should do (but that most computer users never do, including myself) into something every computer user wants to do.
Also notable: iChat! I'm not planning to download Adium (at least not yet), as iChat has proved to equal and exceed Adium's capabilities (except the ability to use my Yahoo! Messenger account, which isn't too lamentable). I have yet to test out the screen sharing feature, but the new backgrounds work like a charm, and are really fun to play around with.
I never used Safari before Leopard, and mostly I still don't, but the ability to make web clippings into Dashboard widgets is a really useful feature. My first clipping? Top ten in all topics on Digg. It's awesome.
The other features in Leopard don't merit too much time to go over. Spaces works as advertised, but I don't ever plan to use it, as it proves to be more of an annoyance to me than anything else. The new Finder is pretty, but hardly any more useful than it was before--except Quicklook, which is super useful. The new dock is one of the most controversial items in Leopard. Personally, I don't mind it so much, but this dock is definitely all about eye candy; really, it only ends up taking up a marginally greater amount of screen space than the last dock. Stacks are nice, but eh, I'll probably never use them. I do like the way it looks to the side, although I feel like theres some wasted space they could have cut out.
But here's the redeeming factor: this upgrade has significantly boosted the performance of my computer. I feel like I've gotten a RAM upgrade--and if your experience is anything like mine, you'll definitely feel the difference. My startup time is faster than before, as well as my overall computing experience. For this reason, I consider the investment totally justifiable.
So here's the verdict: Upgrade. For $129, you get a brand new full-featured operating system with a performance boost, compared to Vista, which requires much higher processing speeds to function properly, and whose entry-level version "Home Basic" (dramatically stripped down for the most dated computers) will set you back $180.
posted by John Mark at 7:10 PM
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